Oddly Interesting
by Rashaka
Summary: Because HL is the new heroin, and it made me actually write Potter!fic. A short interaction between Harry and Luna in a class. Character piece.


Because I needed Harry/Luna fic, and couldn't find much.

My first Harry Potter fic.  It's set after Order of the Phoenix, the near the beginning of 6th year.  Character piece. A short interaction between Harry and Luna in Potions class. Yeah, so they've had Potions with Slytherin every year before.  And so Luna's technically a year below Harry. Blah blah blah. Valdemort's back from the dead, people; try to focus on the important things! 

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Oddly Interesting  
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    Potter's stare was prickling the side of her head yet again.  In Luna Lovegood's informed opinion, the boy had the attention span of an infantile dragon.  Every 27 seconds he would repeat the process: table, Snape, potion assignment, her.  

    Table, Snape, potion, her. 

    TableSnapepotionher.  

    All in all, Luna considered it rude; what was the point of making like you wanted to talk and not doing it?  Glancing was fine, but a stare without follow-up was nobody's friend.  On his next go-around she deliberately turned and caught him at it.  

She smiled--because that was the nice thing to do even to rude boys--and asked him what he wanted.  He faltered, muttered a few words about the Professor and points, then refocused entirely on his potion.  Luna found this act unimpressive, being already aware--along with most of the student body--that Snape was as likely to take points from Harry for staring silently at the person next to him as for disrupting the class with dialogue.  She inhaled slowly, rolling her eyes.  Not good with girls, this one.  That was fine, she was used to boys behaving rudely.  Although she thought he'd be a little more polite since they'd gone into high battle together and whatnot.  Teenage boys had no appreciation, even older ones. 

    She elbowed him hard.  Partly for being a rude teenage boy and partly for altruistic reasons. 

    "You're doing that wrong, you know.  It says 'essence of barley' not 'essence of broccoli.' It might turn you into something green."

    Her expression was neutral as he stomped to the supply table set up in the front of the room.  She smirked faintly when he returned, bent back down to her own work, and whispered without looking at him, "My father's best journalist wrote a story last month about a girl who was born green as grass.  Would you like to see her picture?"

    "No," he said.

    "She's very nice looking, if you believe it.  If you turned green you could go out, and have grass-green children."

    "No; _thanks._ That won't be necessary."

    "Probably for the best," she said.  "You don't seem to do well with girls anyway."

    There was a prolonged silence, filled with the clinking of tools against vials, the rustling of Professor Snape's robes as he stalked about the classroom, and the red cloud of The Boy Who Lived's Misunderstood Teen Angst hanging in the atmosphere above them like a cartoon piano.  Luna knew about cartoon pianos because _The Quibbler_ had once ran an enlightening investigative report on Muggle children's television programming.

    "I do _fine_ with girls."

    "Yes.  Uh-huh." She carefully sprinkled dried mandrake root into her bowl of saffron wine, and didn't need to look up to feel his glare.  

    "What would you know about it?"

    "I am a girl.  You're being unnecessarily snappish.  Case in point."

    Harry turned back to his assignment with a pronounced sulk, and Luna smiled gently to herself as she stirred her mixture.  "It's all right, Harry. This is a fairly stressful way to start a school term, I admit.  New multi-year class scheduling. New DADA teacher.  Everything is quite mysterious and threatening.  We could all die in the next ten minutes if You Know Who should trigger a volcano to rise up right here on the Hogwarts grounds, or make it rain lung-eating squirrels, or sneak a poisoned baby storm cloud into the dorms.  Yes, quite mysterious."

    She finally raised her eyes, and found the glare in his had disappeared.

    "You're a very odd person."

    She smiled, and this time imagined as hard as she could that it made the entire room glow, and maybe helped a little with the general morale.  "Thank you, Harry Potter."

   From the way he looked back, she wondered if perhaps it did.

  
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End file.
